As explained in the above co-pending [ARTIST] US patent application, despite development of Internet web search engines and web crawlers for trying to match buyer requests with seller offers, the prior art had not yet provided, before the invention of that co-pending application, a practical method of automated communication between buyers and sellers that allows for truly free marketplace interaction.
This [ARTIST] approach involves an automated real-time iterative reverse auction system and mechanism consisting basically of a buyer system component (BS), a reverse auctioneer controller component (RAC), and a seller automated engine component (SAEJ)—the present invention being particularly concerned with improvements in the implementation of the SAEJ, and with the said co-pending application describing in detail, the overall architecture of each component, including that of the SAEJ, generally. The present invention, in its thrust toward improved seller automated engines, offers a number of novel implementations of such seller automated engine architectures that can achieve and optimize the seller pricing and goals of the before-mentioned [ARTIST] system of said co-pending application.
In general, in current on-line and off-line marketplaces, it is the buyer's burden physically and manually to decide such questions as what is the best price and what and where and when such is available; who is a trustworthy seller; how to maximize discounts using coupons, promotions, purchasing history etc; how to make multiple sellers compete with one another to get the best price; and how to obtain the benefits of aggregated spending, and volume and historic purchasing power leverage. In addition, in case of multiple goods and services, possibly being shipped to different addresses, there is apparently no existing solution, save the invention of said co-pending [ARTIST] application and the present invention, for automatically finding the best combination of sellers to provide such a best price.